


cornfield meet

by hieronyma



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Implied/Referenced Incest, Injury, M/M, Obsessive Behavior, Recreational Drug Use, Stalking, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-04-04 03:17:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4123779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hieronyma/pseuds/hieronyma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alfred crashes a car. Ivan entertains a guest. It's a small world after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cornfield meet

**Author's Note:**

> **cornfield meet** — a head-on collision, usually between two trains.

“Hey,” said the boy on Ivan’s doorstep.

“Hello,” said Ivan.

It was mid-July. In the thick humid backdrop of of Ivan's yard, fireflies blinked in and out of existence, in and out, like tiny yellow stars. Under Ivan’s porch light, the boy's face was washed out, but not enough to hide the purpling bruise on his cheek. A small scrape on his lip had begun to scab over. There was a long red cut across his temple, running watery pink from the rain, and the bridge of his nose was split open. A spattered pair of glasses hung from the breast pocket of his jean jacket. One of the lenses was cracked. He was drenched.

Ivan catalogued it all in silence. 

It wasn't quite right to think of him as a boy, Ivan mused. There was muscle to him. A young man. That was better.

The young man shifted from one foot to the other, but his back was straight, his expression easy, open.  “Look, you don’t know me, and I’m really sorry about this, but could I use your phone? Mine’s busted, I just crashed my car, you’re like the only house around and I really need to call someone to tow it, so..."

He trailed off, confidently hopeful.

Ivan had always liked being asked for help, whether or not it needed to be given, or if he was in a position to give it—if he wanted to give it. The mere act of asking guaranteed a connection. It bred company. This was unexpected, but it was a good unexpected, like a surprise gift. A package you forgot you ordered. A visit from an old friend.

So Ivan said, “Of course. Please, come in,” and stepped back, but not too far. Just enough to allow their arms to brush when the boy—the young man—stepped over the threshold and into his home.

Ivan closed the door behind himself and discreetly turned the lock.

“I'm Alfred Jones, by the way,” said Alfred Jones, pushing back his sopping hair. He stood in the middle of the air-conditioned foyer and suppressed a shiver. “Thanks for doing this, I really appreciate it.”

Inside, lit by warmer and thinner light, Alfred no longer appeared wan and pasty. His skin had seen sun. His hair, wet, was the color of buckwheat; dry, Ivan imagined it to be a striking natural gold. He brought a scent with him that Ivan identified as damp earth, and a faint whiff of cedar. There was a long smear of mud on his jeans. They were torn at the knees.

"Happy to help," Ivan said. 

Alfred was glancing around, visibly engrossed. His gaze had landed on the nearby long glass cabinet where Ivan kept his grandfather’s samovar and the good china. "Nice place you got here. Sorry I’m dripping all over it.”

“That is what the rug is for."

Alfred looked down at the Caucasian antique he was currently standing on and grimaced a little, shifting his weight.

“Yeah, but it’s a really _nice_ rug.”

“Don’t worry,” said Ivan, smiling indulgently. “The nicest ones I hang on the walls.”

He showed Alfred through to the living room, where indeed a floral Bessarabian rug hung on the wall adjacent to the television. It depicted large red and gold blossoms on a deep black field, flecked with leaves of mint and lilac. Sprigs of chamomile wove through the thick border. It was not a family heirloom, as many of his possessions were; Katya had bought it for him on his twenty-second birthday. That had been the year he graduated.

Alfred was looking at it. Ivan touched his shoulder, and Alfred turned his attention away, back to Ivan, who asked, “Are you badly hurt?” 

“What? Oh, this—yeah, fine.” Alfred gestured to his head and laughed at himself. “Nothing I’m not used to, trust me. Should've seen the other guy.”

He grinned widely, showing very white, very even teeth, then hissed, “ _Ow_ , shit,” when the scabbed cut on his lip tore and began to bleed anew. He touched a fingertip to it and winced.

“Wait here,” Ivan said. He gestured to the linen settee in front of the television. Alfred looked like he was about to protest, but Ivan continued, “I will be right back. Then you may use my phone.”

“Won’t I get your couch wet?”

“It is only water,” Ivan reassured him. “I will bring you a towel.”

He went to the bathroom to retrieve both the towel and the first aid kit. He hadn’t used it for a very long time—not since Natalia had lived with him. She had, on occasion, gotten into fights with her classmates. Forceful Natalia. Determined Natalia. He had asked her why, once, why the fighting, but she would only say that she had done it for him, and Ivan, afraid of what else she might try to put into words, had not asked again. 

When he returned, he found Alfred inspecting himself in the gilded mirror next to the big black cherry bookcase.

“Definitely looks worse than it feels,” he said, poking at the bruise on his cheek, the scrapes just under his jaw. He found Ivan’s eyes in the reflection over his shoulder and arranged his mouth in a way that said, cheerfully, _but what can you do?_

Ivan held up the first aid kit.

“Oh, uh,” said Alfred, turning away from the mirror to face him. “Look, you really don’t have to—“

“That is true,” Ivan said, benevolently. “I don’t have to.”

"Seriously, I can get this looked at later. It doesn't even hurt."

"There is no later," insisted Ivan. "There is only now. You do not want a head wound to become infected."

Alfred seemed unconvinced, but the wry, amused look hadn't wholly left him.

"Okay," he said. “If you’re sure, dude.”

Ivan gave him a smile. It wasn’t his best—he was distracted, Alfred was distracting—but Alfred seemed to accept it anyway, shrugging one shoulder in a lackluster way. He took the towel Ivan offered him and scrubbed futilely at his hair, before spreading it haphazardly over a settee cushion and lowering himself down on top of it.

Ivan perched on the edge of the cushions himself, said, “Stay still,” and then added, a quiet afterthought: “Please.”

When the damp alcohol wipe touched the wound just below Alfred’s hairline, he hissed out, but didn’t flinch.

“Fuck. That stings.”

“It will go away,” Ivan murmured.

A moment passed in silence. After the cut was swabbed clean, Ivan placed the red-streaked wipe on the table and picked up the antiseptic cream. He squeezed a little line onto his forefinger and began dabbing it gently along the laceration. The flesh was pink and tender against the pad of his finger. Alfred was very still underneath his touch.

Ivan felt his eyes on him, watching him. He glanced to meet them, and Alfred didn't blink away. They were very blue up close. 

“You live here by yourself?” Alfred asked suddenly.

“Yes.”

“Big place. Seems lonely.”

“Sometimes,” Ivan allowed. “But every so often, a stray dog will show up on my doorstep.”

Alfred laughed a little at that. His eyes were soft at the corners, as if he smiled often. There was something about them that demanded Ivan's attention. It wasn't just charisma—it wasn't just beauty, either. Ivan couldn’t tell what else it was. 

“You should still visit the hospital, I think,” he said, dabbing the last of the cream into the scrape on the bridge of Alfred’s nose. “I am not a professional. You may have a concussion.”

“I will,” promised Alfred. “Soon as my brother gets here." He paused, then said, "Speaking of, could I use your phone now?”

Ivan drew back with a nod and wiped his forefinger on a clean cotton swab.

“Of course. I hadn't meant to make you wait,” he lied.

He slipped his mobile from his back pocket, unlocked it, and handed it to Alfred, who fiddled with it for a moment before tapping in a number and bringing it up to his ear. Ivan listened as he gathered up the used contents of the kit. Alfred gave his details to the AAA associate and described the approximate site of the crash—about a mile from Ivan’s home, where the road curved sharply next to a shallow dip in the surrounding forest. There was only a wooden guard rail with reflectors to indicate the turn. Ivan knew that in the rain, the heavy downpour of thirty minutes ago, it was very hard to see.

Ivan, who had been watching Alfred’s lips move, almost hadn't noticed when Alfred ended the conversation with AAA and called someone else. 

“Yeah, by the—” Alfred hesitated for a split second, his eyes darting to Ivan, assessing, then away. “—Braginsky house. Yeah, I’m there now.”

_Braginsky house._

Ivan came back to himself with an ugly jolt.

Alfred, anticipating Ivan's reaction, held up a finger as if to say:  _wait your turn._ He continued, “Twenty minutes? No problem. I’ll be here. Bye, Mattie.”

He ended the call and handed Ivan’s phone back. Ivan took it. He was no longer smiling.

“You know who I am?”

Alfred’s face did something strange, then. If Ivan had blinked, he would have missed the way it went blank, as if Alfred hadn’t quite decided on his next expression—but then it came back, as if it had never gone, and he was grinning again, as much as he dared with his busted lip.

“Nah. Not really. You went to my high school. You’d already graduated, but your little sister was a senior when I was a freshman. Besides,” he shrugged, “You’re in the directory. I like to know who lives in my town.”

A great bloom of memories ran through Ivan’s mind—classrooms, locker rooms, parent-teacher conferences with his father, and Katya, looking frustrated and disappointed. High school, for him, had not been kind, as it rarely was to foreigners, but the unkindness had been mostly internal. The majority of the damage had been done before the move. Before America. 

He tried to pinpoint a memory of Alfred, but couldn’t. Had Alfred been watching when Ivan picked Natalia up from school? When he dropped her off? He had done that often. She had asked him to prom, both years; he’d said yes when she was a junior. She was young, and he had wanted to make her happy. He shouldn't have said yes. He said no the second time. Alfred could have seen him then. Alfred could have seen him many times—but he had never seen Alfred before now, and Ivan's memory was very good.

He said, “High school was a long time ago.”

“Only nine years,” Alfred shrugged. “For me, I mean. It’s been like eleven for you, right?”

“Twelve.”

Alfred’s mouth twitched up. “You don’t look thirty.”

“You don’t look twenty-six,” Ivan replied. Alfred Jones was playing a game, and Ivan wanted to know what it was. “I do not enjoy being lied to.”

For a split second, Alfred looked taken aback. Then he looked impressed. “You got me,” he said. “I just turned twenty-one.”

“College?”

“Yeah. MIT. Aeronautics. My brother goes to U of T up in Canada.”

Ivan looked at him very hard. “My sister teaches there,” he said.

Alfred said, “Small world, right?” and grinned hard enough to split his lip all over again.

Ivan reached for a new alcohol swab. A thin trickle of blood made its way down Alfred’s chin, bisecting it. When Ivan leaned forward to wipe it away, Alfred’s eyes burned, and his hand came up to grip Ivan’s wrist, but not to stop him. He hissed through his teeth, but didn’t flinch, just like before, and Ivan pressed a little harder; he touched the pad of his thumb to the cut, behind the barrier of the wipe. He felt the blood soak through.

Physical boundaries seemed extraneous when Alfred had already crossed all others. He didn’t like that Alfred knew his sisters. It was unfair that he might have seen Katya, that his brother might be her student, when Katya wouldn’t even return Ivan’s phone calls—unfair that Alfred would come here and talk about his family like he knew them.

Alfred’s brother was coming to pick him up. Maybe Ivan would get to know him too. It would be a little more fair, then.

Alfred’s palm was sweating, hot and damp against Ivan’s skin.

“Natalia never mentioned you,” said Ivan. He kept his tone sweet.

“She wouldn’t have,” Alfred said. His lips were barely moving. “She was too busy mooning over someone else.”

Ivan slowly withdrew the wipe. He set it down. Alfred loosened the grip on his wrist, then let go completely. There must have been something in Ivan's expression that gave him away, because Alfred took the opening and ran with it.

“Didn’t you know?” he said. “I mean, you had to. She never shut up about you. Everyone thought it was some kind of hero worship thing, that’s why they made fun of her. They thought she wanted to be you when she graduated, but I knew she was obsessed. She had pictures of you in her locker, dude. Like, candid shit. Did you know she took pictures of you? While you were _sleeping_?”

“You shouldn’t talk about things you don’t understand,” Ivan said, but Alfred went on.

“I never told anyone. I mean, she was pretty discreet about that shit anyway. The stuff that might get her in trouble, like the pictures. I think most of the bad ones were on her phone. Plus, I really liked her—I thought she was beautiful, and I didn’t want anything bad to happen, you know? But she was pretty untouchable. I don’t even think she dated or anything. Probably because she was saving herself for... someone special. I think everyone thought her big brother would come beat the shit out of them if they so much as thought about touching her.”

Ivan was having some difficulty identifying the emotions he was feeling. They were all tangled up in his chest, knotted there like fishing line. His hand was slowly going white-knuckled on his thigh. He knew this, of course. Maybe not the pictures. Not the pictures, but Natalia never hid anything else from him.

He wished she had, sometimes.

He knew this, but he let Alfred talk—he was _interested_ , in a way he had forgotten he could be, had convinced himself not to be. He was interested, because Alfred had paid attention. Maybe too much attention. 

Nobody ever paid attention to Ivan. Not in the ways that mattered.

In college, Ivan had learned to be more careful. He had learned the value of self-control. In college, Katya hadn’t been there to be his gauge, to tell him to stop. So he didn’t stop. He couldn’t. Not completely, but he had been _careful_ , he had taken precautions.Had he slipped up somewhere? Had Alfred found out somehow? Did he know? Would he tell?

Logic interrupted. It had been years. Nobody had known. Nobody who mattered. Alfred had not attended his university, Alfred did not know the first thing about him—he knew only about Natalia, and tangentially, Katya, through his brother—but not _him_.

“I always wondered why she was so obsessed with you,” Alfred was saying. His eyes were bright and sharp. “You don’t seem all that special to me.”

Ivan took in a quiet breath through his nose. He smelled rain and wet soil, saw it packed underneath Alfred’s fingernails. Under his porch light, the overpowering brightness of it, he had mistaken Alfred’s expression for one of easy confidence. He understood it now. Not even under all those scrapes and bruises could Alfred hide the way his mouth wanted to pull up and away from his teeth, to bare them in grinning challenge.

Anyone else would have asked Alfred to leave by now. Ivan considered it; he was angry. It would be expected of him to react by taking offense. Did Alfred expect him to react like anyone else would? What did he hope to accomplish?

His anger bled away. He didn't let it show on his face. Why should he react as expected? He was not dealing with someone normal. This Alfred was not some accident-prone college kid asking to borrow Ivan’s phone. That was just a role.

Ivan felt himself shift gears. The game became clear. Alfred had made the first move; now it was Ivan’s turn.

He made his voice go soft. He asked:

“Did you crash your car on purpose?” 

Alfred lit up like a struck match.

“What, just to meet you? Man, that’s a fucked up thing to say,” he said, and grinned so wide and so hard that blood streaked his teeth.

 

* * *

 

When Alfred’s brother—his twin,Ivan saw now—arrived, he smiled apologetically, a worried cast to his eyes.

“Hi, I’m Matthew, here for Alfred? He hasn’t been giving you any trouble, has he?”

He was standing in the same spot Alfred had stood, washed out by the porch light. His smile was sweet, genuine. He radiated generosity. They had the same face, and Alfred’s mask was very good, but side by side with the real thing, Ivan could see the little holes in his disguise. They were small, but they were there.

Ivan smiled. He could be genuine, too.

“None at all,” he said. He stepped out onto the porch with the moths.

Matthew shook his hand and thanked him. Ivan told him what he wanted to hear and handed over a cold pack for the road. Alfred winked at him on the way out. Their forearms brushed. Ivan’s fingers twitched.

He closed the door. He remembered Alfred’s rain-clammy skin. His phone buzzed in his pocket. 

**Alfred (8:45)**  
`u rly shouldnt give ur phone to strangers`  
`they might lie about their phone not working`  
`and go into ur settings`  
`and memorize ur number`  
`and put themselves in ur contacts`

**Alfred (8:46)**  
`lucky were not strangers anymore huh? :)`  
`see ya around, braginsky`

Ivan's fingers steadied. He pressed each letter deliberately. Then he pressed send.

 

**Ivan (8:50)**  
`Until next time, Alfred Jones.`  
`  
`

**Author's Note:**

> Unsure if I'll continue this, but open-ended just in case!


End file.
